Section 2.7. What s the long-term adoption path of ESA? How quickly will I see ROI, and what form will it take?

2.7. What's the long-term adoption path of ESA? How quickly will I see ROI, and what form will it take?

Figure 2-11 shows SAP's current roadmap for ESA adoption graphed against the evolution of IT infrastructures once consolidation/composition begins and against the evolution of business process as the model-driven approach to IT begins to transform how scenarios are designed and how businesses are structured. As you can see, achieving the full potential of process innovation is still as long as two years away. And that's what you should expect.

Figure 2-11. ESA roadmap

ESA isn't a silver bullet; it's not "best of breed" repackaged under a different name with a new set of marketing materials. It's a complete architecture composed of a business process platform, standards, services, and infrastructure that become easier to use with each passing quarter. Those on SAP R/3 can create applications using services that provide value through ESA principles. This is easier in mySAP ERP 2004 and mySAP ERP 2005, and will be easier still later on. SAP and a large ecosystem of ISVs are committed to making ESA a reality.

"Process innovation" comes in all shapes and sizes, and before business analysts begin building and rebuilding scenarios the way most of us would juggle an Excel spreadsheet, there are small but important gains to be realized.

You may recall that earlier, we made the case that ESA would be a boon for employees in the trenches forced to conform their natural way of workingessentially ad hoc business processesto the interface limitations of the software. The enterprise applications told them how to work instead of the other way around.

As you can see in Figure 2-11, "Process integration and user centricity" is the very first step. That's already happening in a joint project between SAP and Microsoft, named Project Mendocino (see Chapter 9). Project Mendocino is an attempt to bridge the gap between daily ad hoc methods of doing businessreturning emails, composing documents, passing along those spreadsheetsand the structured information residing in the backbone of the business. Microsoft estimates that more than $2 billion a year in wasted productivity is spent by frontline employees trying to bridge the gap by hand-copying data from SAP applications to Excel and back again, with the possibility of costly transcription errors present at every step. (And that assumes they're even allowed to touch the enterprise application or data warehouse in question, as opposed to handing a presumably contextual task to a dedicated power user whose time is better spent working on core-related process innovation. And so on....)

Project Mendocino attempts to remedy this by recognizing that Microsoft's suite of desktop applications (Office, Outlook, etc.) is the de facto business interface for most office-bound workers. Instead of creating a new, easy-to-use interface for SAP applications, SAP realized that the interface existed, and its job was to use enterprise services to move functionality out of enterprise applications and into all-too-familiar desktop tools. Within Project Mendocino, alerts and other events generated by enterprise services materialize as emails in Outlook. Business analytical tools are embedded in Excel. Reports and other documents that commonly suffer from inconsistent data and version control are automatically synced with data objects hovering in the background. And employees can realize a degree of self-service, filling out forms and correcting data, as needed, within the data object itself, instead of passing along a request to a power user.